Ukraine split into two geographic camps on Thursday as the nationalist west backed the pro-Western opposition leader as president while the Russian-speaking east supported the disputed victory of the prime minister.
Thirteen years since winning independence from the Soviet Union, this strategic former Soviet republic of 48 million has long been divided between its European-minded west that borders Poland and the east neighbouring Russia.
But the conflict over last weekend’s presidential poll in this new neighbour of an enlarged European Union has led to a sudden polarisation that opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko warned put it ”on the verge of civil conflict”.
As tens of thousands of his supporters massed in Kiev’s central square for the fourth day on Thursday, the western region of Lviv, an opposition bastion, said it would take orders only from Yushchenko.
”We have a legitimately elected president, Viktor Yushchenko,” said Mikhail Sendak, the Speaker of the Lviv regional assembly, which on Tuesday voted to recognise the opposition leader as president.
”We in Lviv region will only obey his orders. I call on other regions to follow suit and to recognise Yushchenko. The bandits falsified the results of the elections,” he told reporters.
Other parts of the west, where Yushchenko got up to 90% of the vote, have rejected the official results and proclaimed Yushchenko president.
But in the eastern coal-mining region of Donetsk, where Yanukovich hails from, supporters of the prime minister travelled to the capital to voice their support.
Igor Yankovsky, a miner from Donetsk in his 40s, was among a group of 200 coal workers who set up camp in a park opposite the government administration building, on a trip organised by their union.
”We came here to support our president because he is our local man. His government raised pensions for us,” he said.
In a sign of the tension, the miner recounted how when his group went to buy bread in a shop in Kiev — where the opposition is dominant — the shopkeeper refused to sell them anything and turned her back on them.
”We want to be friends with other ex-Soviet republics, Russia, Belarus. I heard Yushchenko saying that people from the east are second-class citizens,” Yankovsky said.
The east, where Russian is spoken, is the economic heartland of the country, with a huge coal-mining sector and heavy industry as well as a military-industrial complex that dates back to Soviet times.
Western Ukraine was historically part of Poland before being absorbed by Soviet Ukraine after World War II, and has a long history of resistance, notably with partisan units fighting Soviet rule until the 1950s. This region was at the forefront of the movement that led to the independence of Ukraine in 1991.
Religion is also a big dividing factor, with Uniate Catholics in the west and Orthodox in the east.
Ukraine’s former deputy defense minister Vadim Grechannikov said he feared a conflict in Ukraine, where the centre, including the capital, Kiev, is mainly pro-opposition and the south, including Russian-speaking Crimea, backs Yanukovich.
”I am afraid that the government will use every means at its disposal to hang on to power,” he said.
But ”many people in the military command are pro-opposition,” Grechannikov added, ”especially in the regions where Yushchenko won. It is possible that he could take power in part of the country and assume control over state structures, including the army.”
Mikhail Pogrebinski, a Ukrainian analyst, said the ball was in the court of the ”revolutionaries” backing Yushchenko.
He said the pro-Russian communities in east Ukraine ”will not recognise a candidate placed in power with the help of the European Union”.
Pogrebinski said a power-sharing arrangement, with the pro-Moscow candidate as president and Yushchenko as prime minister could be a compromise in a situation in which neither leader could expect to obtain much power on his own.
Without such a compromise, he warned, ”it’s a civil war”. – Sapa-AFP